Orlando – A Tuesday morning session at the American Society of Safety Professionals (ASSP) conference focused on STCKY – Stuff That Can Kill You – as one of four groups of observations that can be calculated to determine the health of your safety processes and the quality of your leadership.

Observations are defined as “better” – including descriptions of what happened; “limited” – most often pencil-whipping hurried observations; STCKY observations; and non-STCKY observations. STCKY and “better” quality observations as a percentage of all observations produces a score indicating employees have trust in the observation process; are competent or able to make observations; and are motivated to conduct observations because they see value in observations contributing to lower incidents, near misses and other safety indicators.

The trust-ability-value index is evidence of the type of leadership found on the front line. A strong score indicates trusted leadership that effectively coaches observation practices and embeds core safety values. A poor TAV score, with trust lacking, ineffective training and the absence of values, can indicate a policing, command and control type of leadership.

The TAV score can also relate to the quality of the performance of employee teams, groups or departments. Teams that evidence trust and collaboration, competence in safety tasks, and acceptance of safety values are likely to have lower total recordable incident rates.